


and all the scars you bear are from a previous war

by openended



Series: Olivia Shepard [21]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: (vague references to), Children, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Hugs, Motherhood, Nightmares, Parenthood, Post-Reaper War, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-21
Updated: 2016-12-21
Packaged: 2018-09-10 19:08:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8929846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/openended/pseuds/openended
Summary: "I hear reapers," he says, and it's like someone stabbed her through the heart. He's eight.(Mom!Olivia gives some comfort to her adopted son)





	

“Everything about this is wrong,” Olivia says, glaring at the monitor and the muted combat she’s working through.

 _“No,”_ Liara says, shaking her head, _“Don’t even ask. I love you, but I am not hacking into Techware’s code and rewriting an entire game just because they got your hair color wrong. I have other things to do.”_

She sticks her tongue out at the vidcall screen. “Some help you are. And my hair’s the one thing they actually got right.”

_“Why are you even playing that?”_

Olivia shrugs. She squints, aims, and shoots a banshee. A single sniper shot - from a Viper, no less - tears through its barriers. She rolls her eyes: apart from her hair, literally _everything_ about this game is wrong. “Nothing better to do tonight. Garrus and I were supposed to have a date, but he got pulled into some nonsense involving the salarians.” She scrunches up her face as she focuses on taking out a few marauders in her way. “Something about their breeding facilities wanting to borrow incubation technology from the krogan. I don’t know, we got a very angry and incoherent vidcall from Wrex about it. Intervening before he actually _ate_ the dalatrass seemed like a good idea.”

 _“And Garrus lost the coin toss?”_ Liara smirks. 

“Rock, paper, scissors. He still doesn’t quite grasp that paper beats rock.” She dodges, and promptly gets stuck on a box outside of cover. Glaring at the screen, and her rapidly-depleting health, she works her way around it and back into safety. “You know there’s no turian equivalent to rock, paper, scissors?”

_“It’s a meritocracy, Liv. Whoever deserves it the most wins.”_

She scopes in on the banshee to finish taking down its armor, and winces at the eyeful she gets. The game designers took _monstrous cybernetically-twisted naked asari_ and attempted to make them sexy. Two shots of inferno ammo and a concussive round, and the banshee - and its gravity-defying breasts - falls in a very dramatic death animation.

“Anyway. I have no idea when he’ll be back from that, and Techware generously sent me a copy of this mess of a game, so I figured why not. I’m beginning to regret that choice.”

Her two squadmates - poor imitations of James and Wrex (she can’t bring herself to take Garrus along, even if he is almost unrecognizably designed as ten feet tall and very smooth with women) - get up from where they fell and dust themselves off. The game’s squad AI leaves a lot to be desired and her medigel has been bugged since Jupiter.

_“There’s talk of considering Garrus for Councilor, when Devon’s term is up.”_

“I know,” she says, not at all surprised by the shift in topic; Liara does that a lot these days. Garrus is high in the meritocracy (and way too close to Primarch, if you’d ask him), but Devon just took office last year. Barring any kind of scandal - and she’s met Devon, and doubts he even knows what the word means - he’ll be there for the full fifteen-year limit. She and Garrus have talked about it a little, though nothing serious; a lot can happen in the next fourteen years. She knows he’d be fantastic in the job, but he still sometimes sees himself as just a C-Sec agent who quit, and a vigilante who got his squad killed. “It’s a long way off, though.”

A slight whimper and shuffle of feet catches her attention. Olivia abruptly looks up from her game, concerned and on alert. She put her sons to bed three hours ago. 

Quentus stands in the shadows of the doorway, arms wrapped around his small frame. He’s ducked his head down, but even in the shadows she can see that his eyes are wide and on her.

She quickly saves and closes the game. “I gotta go,” she says to Liara, “I’ll call you back in the morning.” She ends the call, cutting off Liara mid-wave. 

Quentus hasn’t moved. 

“What’s wrong?” she asks gently.

He hesitates and then lifts his head. “I had a dream.”

His tight and frantic subvocals give away that it wasn’t a good dream. She shifts, sitting a little more open, inviting him to sit beside her if he wants. Of the two boys, Quentus has been the cautious one, wary. They’ve been with them for eight months, and though he’s a little less reserved with Garrus, she can count the number of times Quentus has completely relaxed around either of them on one hand.

They’re all a mess, in their own ways. He’s hypervigilant. She sleeps with a nightlight. Nico jumps at loud noises. Garrus won’t even look at his armor if he doesn’t have to. The war left its scars on all of them.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

He shakes his head. 

“Do you want a hug?”

He blinks at her, and then nods. He slowly crosses the room and climbs up onto the couch beside her.

Olivia lifts her arm and gently sets it around his narrow shoulders. Cautiously, he leans into her. She presses a soft kiss to his forehead and brushes her fingers across his short crest. He climbs over her legs to sit in her lap, and loops his arms around her neck as he buries his face in her shoulder.

Olivia smiles sadly and settles both arms around her son. “You’re okay,” she whispers, slowly rubbing her hand over his back. “I’ve got you.”

He sniffs and tightens his arms. She does the same, holding him close. It’s hard to interpret his low keening sound as anything other than crying. 

“I miss them,” he says. His breath hitches.

Olivia sighs and kisses his crest. “I know,” she says softly. “It’s okay.” She wonders how many nightmares her children have about seeing their birth parents turned into marauders. 

Probably as many as she has about finding Garrus in her sights, his kind eyes replaced by cold blue circuitry.

They sit in silence for a while as Quentus settles down and cuddles into her. Olivia thinks he’s fallen asleep.

“I hear reapers,” he whispers.

She looks down at him, but he doesn’t move, doesn’t look up - he just stays curled up against her. It isn’t a statement about _now_ , it’s a statement about _always_. 

She feels like someone stabbed her in the heart. Quentus is _eight_. 

He should be playing _durak_ and refusing to eat his vegetables. Instead, he has physical therapy and a nutrition regimen. And he’s hearing reapers. 

Olivia holds him a little tighter.

“They aren’t real anymore,” she promises. “They aren’t coming back. They’re gone forever.”

“How do you know?” he asks, with the tone of someone who’s heard it before and doesn’t quite believe it. She recognizes it from Garrus; Quentus isn’t the only one in the family with nightmares.

Olivia swallows, and decides to share with him a secret only four other people know. “Because I chose to make them go away. At the end of the war, I was offered a choice. I chose to destroy them, for good.”

Quentus pulls away a bit and looks up at her, long and hard. “You stopped them?”

“A lot of people helped get me there, but it was me at the end.” Olivia takes a deep, slow, centering breath. She doesn’t dream of the Citadel most nights anymore, doesn’t dream of Anderson or the kid, doesn’t dream of seeing the galaxy’s fleets torn apart in the stars above her. She doesn’t dream of it, but neither does she like talking about it.

Quentus stretches up, trying to bump his forehead against hers. He can’t quite reach, so she meets him halfway, with a small smile. 

“I hear them too,” she tells him, honestly. In sirens, skycars, in the wind, in silence. Email alerts and omnitool beeps are marauders, and her own growling stomach is a husk. Every time a heavy truck passes, she expects it to beat its chest and roar. 

He tilts his head and furrows his browplates in confusion. “But you just said they weren’t real anymore.”

“I know,” she says. “And I know they’re gone. But it’s hard not to hear them after spending almost two years hearing nothing else.”

He rests his forehead on her shoulder again. “It is,” he says quietly, a little muffled. 

Olivia smoothes her hand over his crest and just hugs him for a while. “You ready to go back to bed?” she asks after he yawns three times in a row. 

“Yeah,” Quentus says. He lifts his head and blinks tiredly at her before climbing down off her lap.

She stands and walks with him back to the room he shares with Nico. There’s plenty of space for the boys to each have their own room, but they wanted to share. The blue nightlight casts faint stars onto the ceiling, just enough light to see and not trip. 

Nico’s still sound asleep in his bed, curled up tight underneath a blanket. Olivia crouches down and picks up the hanar plushie that fell out of his grasp - the arcade’s back in business and Zaeed’s trying to build his high score again - and sets it in her younger son’s arms. He grabs it in his sleep, makes a quiet happy noise, and settles. She brushes a soft kiss to his forehead.

Quentus crawls back into his bed and sleepily fusses with the tangled blankets. His krogan plushie - also courtesy of Zaeed - falls out and onto the floor. Olivia picks it up and gives it to him before shaking out the blankets. She gently pulls the blankets over him and tucks him in. “Sweet dreams,” she whispers, giving him a kiss goodnight. “I love you.”

“Sweet dreams, Mom,” he whispers back when she’s almost at the door.

She pauses and turns to look over her shoulder. He’s already fast asleep, but she smiles widely at him. “Goodnight, Quentus,” she says, and then softly closes the door behind her.

Without a second thought, Olivia walks back into the living room, ejects the game from her computer and drops it into the recycler to be converted into omnigel. 


End file.
